The Confederate government maintained the traditional American subordination of
the military to civilian political authority. Political leaders on several levels were
therefore bound to play an important part in determining which generals would fight the
Confederacy's war in the West and with what resources and strategy.
The first political leaders to take a hand in shaping the Confederate
war effort west of the Appalachians were state governors Both sides in the Civil War
strongly affirmed the doctrines of federalism and state-rights. Their war efforts were
implemented and controlled to a large extent by state governments and their governors.
States recruited the regiments of which the armies were composed, and state governors
continued to exert their influence on those regiments as well as on the national
government and its policies.
The most significant governor for Confederate military operations in
the West was Tennessee governor Isham G. Harris. A lawyer in prewar Memphis, Harris had
served two terms in the United States Congress and then returned to private practice
before being elected governor of Tennessee in 1857, at the age of 39. He was re-elected in
1859 and again in 1861. When Abraham Lincoln was elected president, Harris became an
ardent secessionist, eager to lead his state out of the Union together with the cotton
states of the Deep South. That did not happen, but when in April 1861 Confederate forces
at Charleston, South Carolina, precipitated war by firing on Fort Sumter and Lincoln
responded by calling for 75,000 volunteers to put down the revolt, Harris seized the
moment. "Tennessee will not furnish a single man for the purpose of coercion,"
he responded to Lincoln, "but 50,000 if necessary for the defense of our
rights and those of our Southern brothers." Harris successfully engineered
Tennessee's secession, despite a population that was almost evenly divided on the issue,
and then he got down to the business of organizing the state's armed forces before turning
them over to the Confederacy.(1)
This was a process that took place in each of the Confederate states.
Secession generally preceded formal incorporation into the Confederacy by several weeks.
During that time, each state would place itself on a war footing, raising, organizing, and
in many cases equipping the troops that would later be turned over to the Confederate
government. This included even appointing a major general to command the state's
short-lived "army." In Virginia that job went to Robert E. Lee. In the West,
other future Confederate leaders received appointments as their states' commanding
generals. In Louisiana, Governor Thomas O. Moore appointed Braxton Bragg as the state's
commanding general. Across the river in Mississippi, Governor John J. Pettus gave the
appointment to his state's most renowned soldier, Jefferson Davis. After Davis resigned
the position in order to become president of the Confederacy, Pettus tapped Earl Van Dorn,
a major in the regular army's crack Second Cavalry Regiment and later a prominent
Confederate general. Political pressures tended to make the states' commanding generals
likely candidates for a Confederate general's wreath and stars insignia, and this would
have been true even if the persons in question were not, like Van Dorn and Bragg, officers
of high repute in the prewar U.S. Army.
That fact is borne out by Harris's choice of a major general to command
the Tennessee forces. Born in Tennessee in 1806, Gideon J. Pillow had chosen the career of
a lawyer and had made a success of it. From there he had, like many successful lawyers in
the South, gone on to planting and then, like many successful lawyers in both sections, to
politics. It is strange to contemplate in our own day when lawyers and politicians, as a
class, are not held in very high esteem, that Americans of the Civil War generation
considered such persons to be great men and natural leaders. Thousands of men were eager
to enlist and fight under the banners and the leadership of their favorite politicians.
Many politicians, in turn, were more than eager to lead them, hoping to win military glory
that they could parlay into even more political success.
Gideon Pillow had not waited for the Civil War in order to begin his
quest for amateur military glory. In the Mexican War, a decade and a half before, Pillow
had his friend President James K. Polk appoint him a major general direct from civilian
life. The move was so obviously political that Polk could not get Congress's approval for
it, and he had to avoid submitting his list of general officer appointments to Congress at
all, lest his crony be rejected. That was not enough to save Pillow from disgrace. He
earned the disdain of the top two U.S. generals in Mexico, Winfield Scott and Zachary
Taylor, the latter of whom referred to him as "that contemptible fellow." He got
himself court-martialed and escaped punishment because he was a much better lawyer than he
was a general. His most memorable deed in Mexico was, however, having his men construct a
line of field fortificationsbackwards.2)
This background makes it all the more surprising that Gideon J. Pillow
was the man whom Isham Harris selected to be the commanding general of Tennessee's forces
as he set about organizing a state military establishment in the wake of secession. The
key, as always, was politics. Pillow, like Harris, was a good southern Democrat. Though
Pillow had not been, like Harris, a supporter of extreme southern rights Democrat John C.
Breckinridge for president in the 1860 election (Pillow had backed national Democratic
candidate Stephen A. Douglas instead), the important thing just now was that Pillow had
been a staunch advocate of secession at the earliest possible moment after Lincoln's
victory in that race. During February and March of 1861 he had helped rally public opinion
in favor of Harris and an immediate departure from the Union. If any Tennessean was going
to win military glory in the coming war, Harris wanted it to be Pillow. 3
Instead of winning military glory, however, Pillow performed precisely
as his previous record had given reason to expect. When the Tennessee forces were
incorporated into the Provisional Army of the Confederate States of America, Pillow found
himself holding only a brigadier general's rank in the new Confederate service and
subordinate to Confederate Major General Leonidas Polk. Seething at having been superseded
by the government in Richmond, Pillow proved a difficult, well nigh impossible underling
for Polk, countermanding his orders, refusing to cooperate, and com-plaining constantly
that he was not allowed a respectable amount of discretion. Finally he resigned in a huff.4
Unfortunately for the Confederacy, he thought better of this action and
sought and received his old job back. The South would have been better off without him.
Pillow's two great opportunities to influence the course of the Civil War came in
September 1861 and February 1862, the former before his short-lived retirement and the
latter after. In August and September of 1861, Pillow played an important role in
convincing his superior, Leonidas Polk, to make a military movement that was a supreme
political folly. Pillow and Polk took their forces across the state line into avowedly
neutral Kentucky in order to seize a favorable defensive position on the bluffs
overlooking the Mississippi River at Columbus, Kentucky. In exchange for the minor
military advantage they gained by this move, Pillow and Polk alienated wavering
Kentuckians, undercut the efforts of Confederatesincluding Isham Harristo woo
the Bluegrass State into the Southern fold, and opened up the entire state of
Kentuckyand thus its neighbor to the south, Tennesseefor the advance of Union
troops who dared not cross it before. This was particularly ironic in view of the fact
that no Confederate was working harder to secure Kentucky's secession than Harris himself,
and Harris had been so confident of the happy culmination to his efforts that he had
oriented almost all of Tennessee's initial military build-up toward the defense of the
Mississippi River Valley, the only viable route of Northern access to Tennessee as long as
Kentucky remained forbidden ground to the Federal armies. Pillow and Polk put an end to
all of that in a single September morning.
Pillow's second great contribution to Confederate defeat in the West
flowed naturally from his first. On February 15, 1862, Pillow was second-in-command of a
key post guarding part of the long Tennessee-Kentucky line that his influence had helped
make into the Confederacy's indefensible frontier west of the Appalachians. The post was
Fort Donelson, blocking Union access to Nashville and the rest of Middle Tennessee via the
Cumberland River. Pillow and his superior, Brigadier General John B. Floyd, had been
ordered to hold the fort temporarily, allowing time for the retreating Confederate army to
get clear of Nashville and the upper Cumberland Valley. Then Floyd and Pillow were to cut
their way out of the encircling Union forces and fall back to join the main Confederate
army. All went well at first. The fort bought the needed day or two of time. Then the
Confederates launched their breakout attempt and in a hard, all-day battle, opened the
needed escape route. Pillow chose this point to make his influence felt, pressing upon
Floyd his argument that the troops were tired and had not had anything to eat that day.
They should go back to their camps, eat, rest, and get ready, and then make their escape.
Incredibly, Floyd agreed. The Con-federates withdrew, the Federals surged back and
restored their encirclement, and Floyd, Pillow, and company found themselves trapped
without remedy. Given that Pillow was a man of such striking military and even political
incompetence, it was disastrous for the Confederacy that he was at the same time so
remarkably persuasive. The result of his influence at Fort Donelson was the loss of about
15,000 desperately needed Confederate troops, who went into captivity when their continued
immediate service to the South might possibly have changed the course of the war. To
compound Pillow's shame, he and his boss, Floyd, both managed to make good their own
personal escapes while leaving their soldiers trapped like rats. Pillow and several staff
officers paddled away across the Cumberland River in a small flatboat they had found tied
up along the riverbank.5
It is worth considering, then, when weighing the contribution of
Tennessee governor Isham G. Harris to the Confederate war effort in the West, that Gideon
J. Pillow in a Confederate general's uniform was largely a monster of Harris's very own
creation. That in itself was a serious contribution to Confederate failure in the West.
Nor was Pillow the only questionable general the Tennessee governor
imposed on Jefferson Davis. Harris had selected Pillow largely because of the latter's
Democratic, pro-secession politics. However, when Davis's initial appointments of
Confederate generals from Tennessee included none but Democrats and original
secessionists, Harris began to worry that he was getting too much of a good thing. The
state was almost evenly divided between ardent secessionists and the more reluctant
variety, and many of the latter were former members of the Whig party. Harris feared that
drawing all of Tennessee's generals from the ranks of Democratic fire-eaters might leave
former Whigs with the idea that this was a Democrats' and fire-eaters' war, and those
hotheads should be left to fight it out for themselves. To prevent nearly half the state's
population from drawing that very reason-able conclusion, Harris urged Davis to make
generals out of some former Whigs too and sent him a list of likely candidates. At the top
of the list was the name of Nashville newspaper editor Felix K. Zollicoffer. A Whig,
Zollicoffer would cover Harris's political right flank, and though he had scant military
experience as a militia officer, he should nonetheless be up to the task of commanding the
small force of Confederate troops whose task it would be to suppress the Unionists of East
Tennessee. Politically, it seemed like the ideal solution, and Davis readily seized upon
it.6
Zollicoffer's case is an example of how dangerous it was for a
president to make political appointments to military positions, even in the most
apparently innocuous of circumstances. When Pillow and his superior Polk encroached on
neutral Kentucky in September 1861, that state's neutrality evaporated, and Zollicoffer's
rear-area policing duties turned into a front-line combat command. It can at least be said
for the Nashville newspaperman that unlike Gideon Pillow he always showed plenty of pluck.
Unfortunately, that was not enough for a general with a semi-independent command.
Zollicoffer advanced his small force boldly into Kentucky, took up an ill-sited position
on the upper Cumberland River, and soon found himself threatened by a superior Union
force. Attacking in hopes of cutting his way out of his desperate situation, Zollicoffer
was killed and his force routed at the battle of Mill Springs, January 19, 1862. The
results of that debacle could have been even more dire for the Confederacy had not
Pillow's cooperative blunder at Fort Donelson the following month presented Union forces
with an even more attractive opportunity to tear apart the Confederacy's western front.7
Thus Isham G. Harris's contribution to Confederate officer personnel
was more or less a disaster. His role in pushing incompetent officers on Jefferson Davis
was probably the most destructive of any southern state governor's in such matters. In
fairness, none of the governors was much help in this way. True, Virginia's John Letcher
did appoint Robert E. Lee as his state's commanding general, but Lee's reputation in the
Old Army guaranteed that he would not be overlooked by Jefferson Davis. If an officer or
would-be officer needed a state governor to get him noticed in Richmond, he almost
certainly did not merit the position. Furthermore, in Harris's defense, Tennessee
presented particular political problems because of its divided loyalties. In essence, the
Confederacy paid in military disadvantages and the blood of its soldiers for the need to
woo unenthusiastic Tennesseans.
Harris did other things to influence the course of the war in the West.
He did much valuable work in organizing military forces in Tennessee, so that the
Confederacy could take over a working system of defense in the state. Harris's efforts in
1861 provided the vital core of what would become the Confederate Army of Tennessee, whose
remnants finally surrendered to William T. Sherman at Durham Station, North Carolina, in
April 1865. Unfortunately for the Confederacy, however, Harris assumed that Kentucky would
remain neutral indefinitely and so oriented his defensive efforts primarily toward the
Mississippi River. This orientation was natural for him as well as for the other large
slaveholders who dominated Tennessee's secessionist politics in that they themselves came
overwhelmingly from West Tennessee. This Mississippi River myopia on Harris's part helped
to contribute to subsequent Confederate disasters at Forts Henry and Donelson, by which
the Mississippi River defenses were turned.
Finally, Harris might have been of more service to the Confederacy had
he possessed more knowledge of medicine. During the course of the war, Harris served as a
volunteer military aide to several Confederate generals. At the battle of Shiloh, Harris
was serving on the staff of General Albert Sidney Johnston, and when that officer was
wounded on the afternoon of that battle's first day, Harris was the only staff member
present. He led Johnston's horse to a sheltered area and helped the general dismount, but
he was unable to locate Johnston's wound and took no steps to stanch his catastrophic loss
of blood. Helplessly, Harris watched the general bleed to death, even thought Johnson had
a spare tourniquet in his pocket.
Besides governors, other political leaders who exerted an influence on
Confederate fortunes west of the Appalachians included certain key cabinet members.
Secretary of War Leroy Pope Walker was an Alabama fire-eater who had once quipped that he
would sop up with his pocket handkerchief all the blood that might be shed as a result of
Southern secession. He was not the most successful or influential of the Confederacy's
secretaries of war, but he carried out Jefferson Davis's orders and his political
instincts proved better than the president's on at least one occasion. When, in September
1861, Leonidas Polk, at Pillow's urging, moved his troops into Kentucky and Isham G.
Harris sent an impassioned plea to Richmond for a reversal of this political disaster,
Walker at Davis's behest responded immediately by ordering Polk to withdraw. Polk ignored
the order and appealed to Jefferson Davis, who unwisely accepted the claims of his old
West Point crony that the move was a military necessity and reversed himself. A few days
later, Davis replaced Walker as secretary of war, but the Confederacy would have been
better off if at least on this occasion Davis had sustained his initial decision and the
orders issued by his secretary of war.8
The man who replaced Walker was Judah P. Benjamin. A Louisiana
lawyer-planter, Benjamin might have been expected to show great interest in the western
theater. However, perhaps to an even greater extent than was true with the Confederacy's
other secretaries of war, Benjamin performed as an errand boy for Davis, taking no
significant action without the president's direction. The most significant western theater
decision to go out over Benjamin's signature was an early 1862 request to Braxton Bragg,
then commanding a small force in Pensacola, Florida, to accept a transfer to the
trans-Mississippi, which he would then command as a department separate from Albert Sidney
Johnston's large western command. This, of course, was Davis's idea, and a very bad one.
The Mississippi River was an absurdly obvious potential avenue of Union advance, and the
Confederate defenders on both banks of the river needed to report to the same
headquarters. In response to Benjamin's overture, Bragg readily agreed to go if ordered
but raised a number of reservations about the wisdom of the move. Benjamin, again at
Davis's behest, dropped the matter, and for the time being the Confederacy's western
defenses remained undivided on the two sides of the Mississippi.
In the late winter of 1862, Benjamin's tenure at the War Department
gave way to that of George W. Randolph. A Virginian and former U.S. naval officer,
Randolph was in many ways the most able of the Confederacy's secretaries of war. Much of
his attention, like that of other top Confederate leaders in the spring of 1862, was
directed to the defense of Virginia in general and Richmond in particular. However, in the
fall of that year, Randolph made his one special contribution to Confederate efforts in
the West by urging trans-Mississippi commander Theophilus Holmes to take his force across
the Mississippi to join with Confederate forces on the east bank. This made good sense,
but unlike Benjamin's unfortunate overture to Bragg the previous winter, it was the
secretary of war's very own initiative and not simply a message passed on from the
president. Although Davis had only recently written to Holmes hinting at something of the
sort, the outright urging on the part of Randolph seemed to offend the president. He now
asserted that he had never suggested anything of the sort and that allowing Holmes and his
forces to cross the river would be a terrible idea. He concluded by demanding that
Randolph countermand his previous instruction to the general. Randolph did, and promptly
resigned. As in the case of Walker on Kentucky neutrality, and even more emphatically this
time, Davis would have been better off allowing his secretary of war's action to stand.9
Randolph's replacement was the longest-serving Confederate secretary of
war, James A. Seddon. Like Randolph a Virginian, Seddon was capable but fully compliant to
Davis. He not only followed the president's policies but made sure that he never appeared
to be acting on his own initiative. In council Seddon was generally an advocate of a
strong Confederate defense of the western theater, but naturally did not press his views
to the point of conflict with Davis. During the Vicksburg campaign, and almost certainly
with the president's approval, Seddon vigorously urged General Joseph E. Johnston to take
positive steps for the relief of the besieged city, even to the point of offering to take
full responsibility for failure if Johnston would only make the attempt. Like all other
attempts to goad Johnston into action during the Vicksburg campaign, this one was doomed
to failure.10
Aside from the Confederacy's several secretaries of war, one other
cabinet member figured significantly in the course of the war in the West and that was
Postmaster General John H. Reagan. When Davis and his cabinet met in May 1863 to discuss
the military situation and whether Robert E. Lee ought to be allowed to take his army
north of the Potomac that summer, Reagan, a Texan, argued the reinforcement of Johnston
instead, in hopes that the Confederacy could lift the siege of Vicksburg. Reagan lost that
debate, but he was so adamant in his belief that reinforcements ought to be sent to the
Mississippi Valley that he urged Davis to call another meeting and revisit the matter the
next day. Only when it became obvious that the rest of the cabinet would not support him
did Reagan give up his efforts to see the western theater reinforced. Hindsight has made
the postmaster general look very wise indeed.
Above them all and most important to Confederate fortunes in the West
and elsewhere was Jefferson Davis. More than any other political leader Davis determined
how the South would fight its war. It was Davis who acceded to Isham G. Harris's wishes
and the perceived political exigencies of Tennessee by making generals of Gideon J. Pillow
and Felix Zollicoffer. Davis who also made a general of Leonidas Polk because he believed
the Episcopal bishop would, as a general, produce a good political effect on the people of
the Mississippi Valley. It was Davis who acquiesced in Polk's foolish and premature
squandering of Kentucky neutrality, countermanding the order he had directed Secretary of
War Leroy Pope Walker to give only hours before. It was Davis as well who dictated to
every one of the Confederacy's secretaries of war virtually every significant military
action or policy. For better or worseand the end result was much for the
worsethe Confederacy's struggle was Jefferson Davis's war.
Davis's performance as Confederate commander-in-chief was good in some
ways, bad in others. On the one hand, he lost a very winnable war. On the other, he
avoided many mistakes that might have hastened defeat and thereby shortened the war
considerably.
Davis's selection of general officers is an example of these two
parallel aspects of his tenure. He did make disastrous appointments such as those of Polk,
Pillow, John B. Floyd, and John McCown, to name a few. However, at the same time Davis
showed a marked preference for trained military professionals and a comprehensive
knowledge as to which officers of the old United States Army were held in the highest
regard. In Virginia, that preference ultimately gained him a success-ful commander in the
person of Robert E. Lee. In the West, the situation was more problematic. Whether Albert
Sidney Johnston would have fulfilled his pre-war promise or continued his early war
misfortunes became a moot point by 2:30 in the afternoon on April 6, 1862, when Johnston
succumbed to the effects of wounds received that day at the battle of Shiloh. Thereafter,
Davis's old Regulars of high reputationPierre G. T. Beauregard, Braxton Bragg, and
Joseph E. Johnston proved less than fully satisfactory commanders. So too did several of
Davis's appointments to the rank of lieutenant generalJohn C. Pemberton, William J.
Hardee, Daniel H. Hill, and James Longstreet. Each of these men was a West Point graduate
but none proved fully successful in the West and some were nothing short of disastrous.
In the cases of Beauregard and Joseph E. Johnston, character flaws
prevented otherwise talented men from achieving success. Davis failed to anticipate these
flaws from the men's prewar record, but he did quickly diagnose the problem in at least
Beauregard, whom he subsequently relegated to less important assignments.
Davis seems to have been aware that there was something wrong with
Joseph E. Johnston as well, but in that general's case, the Confederate president seemed
almost completely unable to set aside the previous high opinion in which Johnston had been
held by the nation's military community. For Davis the prospect of getting good service
out of the fatally flawed Johnston was a will-o-the-wisp, an alluring prospect that seemed
to hang always just out of reach. Somehow, in another assignment, another place, Johnston
would turn into the good general everyone had always thought he would be. He never did. By
the time Davis realized his error in Johnston's case, the general had already done great
damage to Confederate fortunes in the West, by failing to make any effort to relieve
Vicksburg during the spring 1863 siege, by allowing the initiative to remain in Union
hands during the year that followed, and by surrendering without a fight so much territory
in northern Georgia that the fall of Atlanta was already assured well before Davis finally
sacked him in mid-July 1864. Even before the fall of Vicksburg, Davis seems to have begun
to grasp Johnston's worthless-ness as an army commander, but the Confederate president was
boxed in by his own rigid preference for West Point-trained professionalsa
preference that served him well at other timesand his stubborn insistence on the
primacy of seniority. By that time, few other choices remained open for Davis within the
artificial constraints he had erected.
In the way he handled his generals, Davis once again could have done
either better or worse. He encouraged his generals to fight when necessary, and his
strategic advice was often sound. He also showed a reluctance to reward generals who
fomented discontent against their superiors, as Daniel Harvey Hill learned when his all
but mutinous behavior during and after the Chickamauga campaign resulted in his virtual
demotion from lieutenant general down to the rank of major general.
In this area of endeavor, however, there is far more to criticize in
Davis's performance. The Confederate president did not make the most of his available
officers. He practiced gross cronyism in his appointments and subsequent indestructible
support of the incompetent and massively disruptive Leonidas Polk, handicapping every
general who had to try to accomplish anything with the high-ranking but unsuited
bishop-general. At least in part to cover his favoritism to Polk, Davis insisted on a
rigid adherence to the primacy of seniority in the appointment and promotion of generals,
refusing to remove inadequate senior officers (such as Polk) or to advance their more
talented juniors.
Davis's most serious misuse of a general was the case of Braxton Bragg.
Bragg was a flawed but talented general, a good organizer and strategist and an adequate
tactician by Civil War standards. He was less than adequate at the arts of motivating his
high-level subordinates. While it would obviously have been desirable to have in Bragg's
place some sort of Robert E. Lee-clone, that was an obvious impossibility. Davis was well
aware that he would have to make do in this waras in any warwith a very few
great generals and a larger number of mediocre ones. All the more reason, then, that Davis
should have worked doubly hard to compensate for Bragg's political flaws so that he could
get good service out of this in some ways mediocre general. Instead, Davis presented Bragg
with a situation that probably no general, including either Lee or Ulysses S. Grant, could
have overcome. Davis forced upon Bragg as top-level subordinates, against the latter's
expressed wishes, a collection of misfits, malcontents, and malicious schemers, many of
them of doubtful quality, including the president's precious crony Polk and such
Lee-rejects as Daniel H. Hill. These men undermined Bragg not only by spreading gossip and
innuendo against him within the army but also by insuring, through blunders and outright
disobedience of orders, the failure of every one of Bragg's major campaigns. As the
malcontents intended, Bragg's popularity finally dropped to the point that Davis had no
choice but to remove him, but the damage done to the Confederacy by that time was
incalculable. Davis should not have permitted this.
More equivocal was Davis's organization of the territory within the
western theater. His departmental organization had much to recommend it, as especially
during the first year of the war it helped to rationalize and direct the Confederacy's
defensive efforts. On the other hand, Davis showed a propensity to allow a lack of
cooperation across departmental lines, and, most seriously, he allowed himself to think of
the Mississippi River as a tidy departmental dividing line rather than a potential,
indeed, certain highway of invasion. The tendency to divide command along the Father of
Waters was displayed in his earlier 1862 query to Bragg regarding an independent
trans-Mississippi command and in the subsequent creation of such a department under the
command of other officers. It became virulent with Davis's refusal to back Randolph's
suggestion of cross-river cooperation and combination in the fall of 1862. Long before
Vicksburg fell, Davis's policies had already severed the ties of military cooperation
across the great river.
In summary, Davis, like other Confederate political leaders, played an
important role in shaping the course of military events in the western theater of the
Civil War. In the president's case, as in that of the governors and cabinet members, that
role was of decidedly mixed quality, sometimes aiding Confederate fortunes and sometimes
helping to fasten upon the would-be nation the doom that finally overtook it.